American Customer Satisfaction Drops

By consumerist.comMarch 27, 2008

The American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) dropped again for the second consecutive quarter to 74.9. Why does this matter? “When customer satisfaction declines, consumers have less enthusiasm for repeating experiences that no longer provide the same gratification,” says Professor Claes Fornell. AKA, they’ll be spending less money.

Is there any correlation between Customer Satisfaction and actual performance of the economy? I guess what I mean is, people may be unhappy with customer service, but that doesn’t necessarily stop them from shopping, buying, etc. in the same quantity. I’d assume there is some impact, but you never know.

@nequam: True. But I wonder if our expections have been slowly declining so that we’re now estatic for something that used to piss us off. I assume they can’t correct for something so subjective.

Example: I would freak out (in a good way) if I called a customer service number and a live person with good english skills answered the phone in a few rings. 10 years ago, we EXPECTED that. Anything less would be disappointing.

What does this index measure? How are the points calculated? Is a tiny difference like this meaningful or just statistical noise? The bottom 70 points have been cut off to make the swing look larger in the picture. This article is useless :(

I’m sorry, but my first inclination was to laugh at this graphic. It’s vague enough it could be used in a variety of ways. For example, change the scale on the y-axis, and you have a fairly close track of my weight over the past 15 years.

Oh my goodness the sky is falling! The sky is falling. The ACSI dropped to its fourth or fifth highest level since 1994. Never mind that its level is still higher than 49 out of the last 55+ periods. This is a non-event.

ARP: If they’re trying to measure customer satisfaction, shouldn’t it be given customers’ current expectations? If we want to see what customer satisfaction would be given our expectations from, say, 20 years ago, that would be a different question. And that would certainly be less closely related to our current spending habits.

PS If you want to find out more about the methodology, a poke around their website is helpful :) ([www.theacsi.org])